How I Generate Warm Leads For $0.07 Each on Facebook

On Facebook, my top-of-the-funnel ads average $0.07 per click with a 10-13% conversion rate for link clicks. These are ads being shown to cold traffic, meaning people who have never even heard of my brand before. To be honest, it’s nice to have a $35 budget to promote my site and draw in 500 unique visitors. These are people I can later market my products to who I've built some level of trust with. I’m not an expert or consider myself a guru, but am here to explain an approach that has worked for me that you can potentially apply to your own lead-generation efforts.

Whether you’re a social media advertiser or a sales rep putting out an email campaign, there might be something for you to learn here.

How do I achieve these kind of results? It mainly comes down to two things:

Providing 100% value up front

Showing the right content to the right people

Let’s start with the first one: providing value. As a marketer, I NEVER go for the sale right away and try to ‘close’ the customer the minute they initially see me. On a first date, do I immediately ask the girl to marry me and set up a joint bank account? Hopefully not. When starting an initial conversation with a potential customer, my approach is strictly value-driven and focused on giving. This helps build rapport and trust. How do I provide value? CONTENT. Think blog posts, ebooks, PDF guides, etc. Anything that the customer can take advantage of right now, but is relatable enough to my solution to where I can sell to them later. Content is cheap to advertise on Facebook and when you retarget those people that engaged with your brand's content initially, your conversion rates will be much higher than if you initially just advertised your products on the first encounter. This is because you're marketing to people that simply trust you, because you provided that value-based content initially. However, this will only prove to be very effective from an ROI standpoint if...

You show the right content to the right people. Regardless of how good the content is, if a blog post about how to better plan a marketing budget is put in front of a bunch of software engineers, the best possible results from a cost standpoint will not be achieved. This is because the content will not be as relevant and therefore not as many people will click for the impressions you pay for. How do you go about finding the most relevant people to target ads or any kind of outreach to? On Facebook, it’s as simple as having their machine learning algorithms clone audiences based on people who have already engaged with my brand or have purchased (lookalike audiences). Additionally, here are some suggestions for people advertising or selling outside of Facebook:

Study the people who are either on your email list or chose to purchase your product. If you’re selling a consumer product, analyze what their age, gender, and interests are. If it’s an enterprise product, analyze what their job title is, what industry they’re in, the revenue of that company, how big it is, etc. These people have at least showed some level of interest in your brand and what you’re offering, so they should at least be a basis for the type of people you market or sell to in the future. Keep in mind, it’s important to make these decisions through data, not assumptions.

Overall, when selling a product, I would suggest providing value up front to build rapport with your target audience (by producing content) and make sure you show it to the right people for the best bang for your buck. In this way, you’ll have a cheap way to generate warm leads and your acquisition costs could very well be much lower in the long run. As as a universal takeaway no matter what your job title is, the act of initially establishing trust and providing value before you go for the sale will make the difference between smooth-sailing down the coast and being stuck treading water.